The second section of the Hearing of Santa Cruz de Tenerife will host next Tuesday the trial against the owner and an employee of a restaurant in Puertito de Güímar accused of harassing a homosexual couple who reside in the house next to said establishment.
The Prosecutor’s Office asks for each of them the penalty of two years in prison and a fine of about 2,100 euros for a crime of incitement to hatred based on sexual orientation, and as civil liability that they jointly and severally compensate the couple for moral damages in the amount to be determined in execution of sentence.
In addition, it requests that the victims be kept at no less than 500 meters for a period of two years.
As stated in the qualification letter, the defendants, “guided by the spirit of degrading and belittling” their neighbors for their homosexual condition, uttered “continuously and publicly and aloud all kinds of expressions against them.”
Among these, he quotes some verbatim: “there live the fags of Puertito”, “this is the house of the fags of the Puertito”, “I would give the fags a beating”; phrases sometimes accompanied by obscene gestures touching the genitals.
One of the defendants, as detailed in the prosecution’s brief, told one of the victims shouting if he had gone to vote -in the general elections of April 28, 2019- and to vote for a certain political party that was going to “kill all the fags”.
Beyond the insults and threats – “the house of the fags, they are pigs, you have to kill them” or “clown, I smack you that I make you a man” -, the car of the victims appeared one day with scratches in the form of a penis.
The Office of the Prosecutor notes that there are video recordings of obscene gestures and profanity uttered by the accused.
The representative of the public prosecutor emphasizes that these attitudes have generated “an intimidating, hostile and degrading environment” for the couple, which has “seriously” altered the development of their daily lives.
According to a forensic medical report, one of the victims suffers from an adaptive disorder with medium-type anxiety, for which he has been subjected to psychopharmacological therapy, and suffers from a mild-degree anxiety-type adjustment disorder
